How Leadpages Used Drift to Increase Their Conversion Rate by 36%

If you work in or around the world of marketing, you’ve definitely heard of Leadpages.

They’re the makers of the industry’s leading drag-and-drop landing page creator, which is designed to help marketers increase conversion rates.

So when the Leadpages team started using Drift to help improve the conversion rate of their website, we were curious to see how they were using it, and whether or not they were able to move the needle on conversions.

The tl;dr version:

Leadpages started out using Drift simply for chatting with site visitors, but they soon discovered that by targeting specific pages and site visitors with proactive messaging campaigns, they could open up a “fast lane” for their best leads.

To quote Leadpages CMO, Dustin Robertson:

Site visitors ask questions through Drift as they consider purchasing our software. But there’s more to Drift than just chat. We can proactively reach out to visitors. And with Drift’s automation features, we’ve been able to increase the conversion rate of our site visitors by 36%.

Next steps: Leadpages has big plans for making conversations even more central to their marketing, including using Drift’s intelligent sales assistant for scheduling sales demos.

Keep reading for the full breakdown of how the Leadpages team has been using Drift to generate leads and move them through their sales funnel.

The Power of Saying “Hello”

During their first few weeks using Drift, the Leadpages team kept it simple:

They added Drift to their website, and waited for website visitors to start conversations with them.

Their goal was simply to add a new communication channel where they could provide help and answer questions for prospective customers.

And guess what? It totally worked. They were averaging more than a hundred conversations each week.

But after seeing how valuable these conversations were, they decided they needed to do more, and be more proactive in engaging with their site visitors.

As Leadpages CMO Dustin Robertson told us:

“We hypothesized that if we could proactively reach out to visitors with a welcome message, they would chat with us more.”

Drift in Action

(Leadpages Pricing Page)

Welcome Messages

A welcome message lets your site visitors know that you’re open for business. It’s the virtual equivalent of having a salesperson greet shoppers as they walk into a store.

And while it takes just a few seconds to set up, a welcome message can have a huge effect on the number of conversations you have with potential customers.

Case in point: Leadpages had 310 conversations with site visitors between April 22nd and May 22nd, which was before they had a welcome message up.

Between May 23rd and June 23rd, after they put up their welcome message, Leadpages had 1,168 conversations with site visitors.

That’s 267% growth — just from saying “hello.”

How Customer Conversations Bring Teams Together

After the number of conversations the Leadpages team was having with site visitors had nearly quadrupled in the span of a month, they realized that they needed help responding to everyone.

It’s a common issue we see teams run into when they decide to start engaging with their site visitors real-time, especially for companies that generate a lot of traffic: Managing conversation volume.

Leadpages solved this issue using a multi-pronged approach, just like we do here at Drift.

One of those prongs involved expanding who uses Drift from beyond just the marketing team (who had been running everything up until that point) to including customer success in the process as well.

As Dustin told us, “This brought the teams together to help visitors with pre-sales conversations.”

That’s one of the hidden benefits of running a conversation-powered sales and marketing funnel:

It creates alignment. Because it forces teams to work together to figure out how they’ll describe certain product features, and how they’ll respond to certain questions, and whether or not they’ll use emojis in their responses.

(For the record, at Drift we are all for using emojis when chatting with leads and customers — provided the occasion calls for it, of course.)

But bringing more departments into the fold is just one way Leadpages is managing their conversation volume.

The First Campaign

Once they had succeeded in driving conversation volume, the Leadpages team set a goal to increase the conversion rate of the site visitors who were interacting with Drift.

As Dustin explained: “Our hypothesis was that Drift automation features could assist.”

Specifically, the team was interested in setting up an automated messaging campaign that could target certain visitors on certain pages.

Since many of our live conversations result in us sharing links to related content on our site, we started using a Drift campaign to help users with their research as they browsed our site. Our campaigns help visitors who are comparing our product to a competitor.

After running their first proactive messaging campaign, Leadpages saw an open rate of 30% and a click-through rate of 21%.

(So 30% of visitors who saw the targeted message on the website opened it, and 21% of those who opened it clicked the call-to-action that was included in the message.)

For comparison, the industry average email open rate is 21.5%, while the average email click-through rate is just 2.5%.

Above: Screenshot of a Drift campaign the Leadpages team runs on the Comparison page of the Drip website. (FYI: Drip is a subsidiary of Leadpages.)

Looking to the Future…

Overall, Drift has helped Leadpages grow the conversion rate of their website visitors by 36%.

But as you may not be surprised to learn, the Leadpages team thinks they can do better.

Specifically, they’re focused on expanding how they use Drift to include these three functions:

2) Scheduling migration services. They’ve also started using a bot for scheduling migration services, so that new customers can set up a time to get everything switched over right after they buy.

3) Opening support tickets. The Leadpages team is integrating their support knowledgebase with Drift, which will automatically provide visitors with helpful and relevant documentation based on the questions they ask.

The Leadpages team helped highlight a key point about Drift — that it’s not just a live chat tool, it’s a conversation-driven marketing automation tool.

Drift doesn’t just help you talk to more people, it helps connect your business with your best leads in real-time, so you can turn any conversation into a conversion.

So, want to find out how you can improve your conversion rate by 36% like Leadpages did?

See why thousands of businesses use Drift to generate leads & close deals faster.